FRANCE AND THE MIDDLE EAST

The centuries-old relations between the French and the peoples of the Middle East have been replete with confrontations and contradictions.

Constituents of a Mediterranean world encompassing the Mashriq and the Maghrib, the geographic proximity of the French and the peoples of the Middle East has helped sustain both their affinities and their animosities. In war as in peace, they have had to deal with the problems, as well as the opportunities, of economic life. Some of the ambiguous features of their relationship have derived from their collective links to frequently discordant Greco-Roman, biblical, and Islamic traditions and to no less problematic modern ideologies of social change and nation building. In whatever combination of identities—whether religious, as, for example, Roman Catholic on the one hand, and Muslim, Eastern Christian, or Jewish on the other, or secular, as, for example, French on the one hand, and
Ottoman, Turkish, Arab, or Israeli on the other—their encounters have been marked by a bittersweet interaction of words and deeds. Negative images of the "other" have been more often in evidence, particularly on the part of the French, than mutual displays of consideration or acknowledgements of collective achievement.

France's contentious presence in the modern Middle East was shaped in part by distinctive percolations of change among the Western powers. The forces of modernity, which advantaged the West before other parts of the world, enabled the French, as one of Europe's great powers, to exercise an intrusive, frequently aggressive imperialist presence in various parts of the Middle East from Syria to Morocco. France itself, however, suffered from constraining imbalances in the modern reconfigurations of power that left it at a disadvantage when confronting rival intrusive presences in the region—Britain's for much of the period, Germany's before and during the two world wars, and that of the United States during and after World War II.

The history of France's involvement with the peoples of the Middle East was also determined by the different ways in which they responded to the challenges of modernization. In some cases, the peoples of the Middle East sought to remove the intrusive features of French influence, as was the case with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey by 1923 and with Egypt by 1956; in others, they sought to secure their independence from French occupation, as in Syria and Lebanon by 1945–1946, in the North African states of Tunisia and Morocco by 1956, and in Algeria by 1962. Their national movements and modernizing administrative polities were shaped by internally developed and externally induced changes. The character of French relations with the relatively unconstrained nineteenth-century Ottoman reformers and their twentieth-century Turkish successors thus differed significantly from their relations with the more dependent mid-nineteenth-century viceroys of Egypt. These, in turn, differed from France's relations with the disfranchised Arab politicians of French-mandated Syria during the 1920s and 1930s and with Algeria's revolutionary leaders struggling for independence in the 1950s and early 1960s.

French Entry into the Middle East

Antithetical undercurrents were never far below the surface in the modern history of Franco–Middle Eastern relations. While the Franks of the Middle Ages had vigorously embraced Europe's Roman Catholic Crusades against the Muslims, sixteenth-century France recognized the strategic usefulness of friendly relations with the Ottomans as a counterweight to the Hapsburgs. The French subsequently developed a commercial preeminence in the Mediterranean over much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Ottomans were increasingly drawn into the European-dominated world economy. Expatriate French merchant communities in the Mashriq, the region they called the Levant, traded under the umbrella of the capitulations, France having been among the first to enjoy this Ottoman assignment of extraterritorial juridical status to resident foreigners. Yet, the French offset the Muslim policy that had brought them closer to former enemies with a preclusive Roman Catholic policy that harnessed their good relations with the Ottomans to the development of a religious protectorate in the empire, favoring the work of proselytizing Roman Catholic missionaries. By the nineteenth century, the most important corollary to this policy
had become their informal, but nevertheless real, support for the political autonomy of the Roman Catholic community of Maronites in Ottoman Lebanon.

The Ottomans, for their part, had assigned less importance to these contacts with France until the eighteenth century when modernizing changes began to attract the interest of reformers concerned with the fate of the receding empire. Sultan Selim III, the beginning of whose reign in 1789 coincided with the outbreak of the French Revolution, did not allow the problem of regicide in Europe to distract him unduly from applying, with the help of French advisers, the lessons of the French military sciences to some of the reforms he attempted to introduce. The sultan's friendship with the French, however, failed to prevent Napoléon Bonaparte from trying in 1798 to gain an advantage in Europe's revolutionary wars by means of a grandiose and abortive scheme pegged to the occupation of the Ottoman province of Egypt, which came to be considered a strategic key to hegemony in the East. In the same vein, by the time the occupation ended in 1802, France had alienated the Egyptians. Their experience was such that French administration, development projects, and scientific advances did not outweigh the adverse effects of the military invasion, or of the political opportunism, cultural arrogance, and colonial aims underlying the occupation. This proved to be an early example of the kind of power relationship that undermined French claims to the exercise of a civilizing mission.

The antithetical features of French interaction with the peoples of the Middle East remained generally pervasive. On the one hand, the history of France's contribution to the betterment of the human condition ensured that accounts of its progressive ideas and sociopolitical experiences received frequent and attentive hearings in the debates on reform that engaged the leading Middle Eastern advocates of change, to many of whom French became a second language. On the other hand, France's imperial interests frequently ran counter to reforms based on the very principles to which the French so eloquently laid claim. The French were not above combining sound investments in Middle Eastern economies with political support for speculative cupidity. As self-interested players in the so-called nineteenth-century Eastern Question, they not only helped to petrify the extraterritorial privileges they enjoyed, and to encourage continued foreign administration of the public debts in which they had invested, but they also participated in the consolidation of imperial spheres of influence in the Middle East.

British Influence on French Policy

The history of French influence in the Middle East was further complicated by unrelenting Anglo–French rivalries. Britain's industrial advantages, combined with the naval superiority it had acquired in the Mediterranean during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, limited France's strategic options and commercial opportunities. Overtaken by Britain at the Sublime Porte, the French tried to refocus their interest during the 1820s and 1830s on links with Muhammad Ali Pasha, the independent-minded and expansionist Ottoman governor of Egypt. They were unwilling, however, to risk a European conflagration by coming to the pasha's assistance in 1840, when Britain and the concert of Europe curtailed his power during the second Syrian war. They reconciled themselves instead to falling back for influence in the Levant on their links with the Maronites of Mount Lebanon, who continued to respond best, though to a narrowly focused Roman Catholic policy. During the nearly two decades of Napoléon III's second empire, and in the aftermath of France's participation in the Crimean War on the side of the Ottomans, French influence among the Maronites equaled that of Britain. During this period the two powers cooperated in an imaginative resolution to the civil strife that had broken out in Lebanon in 1860. In Egypt, France even won an advantage at this time by working for the construction of the Suez Canal. Thereafter, however, three debilitating wars with Germany between 1870 and 1945 left the French at a lasting disadvantage. They had their eyes firmly fixed across the Rhine in 1882 when they failed to act with the British in Egypt, thereby forfeiting to Britain the base from which it was better able to develop its lead.

The French, having once more returned to reinforcing their links with the Maronites after 1870, were subsequently able to use Mount Lebanon as a stepping-stone to a sphere of influence in the Ottoman Empire's Syrian regions. Nevertheless, they secured only a Pyrrhic victory there in the aftermath of World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. For one thing, partitioning the empire ran counter to the not inconsiderable capital investments they had made during the later part of the nineteenth century in its overall development. For another, their Roman Catholic policy limited the influence they were able to exercise in Syria and Lebanon over Muslim and non-Roman Catholic Christian constituencies upon whose acquiescence they were dependent. Franco–British alliances in the two world wars did not substantially affect this unfavorable equation. After World War I, Britain limited the imperial expansion of the French to the Lebanese and Syrian mandates, denying them the role in Palestine and the Mosul region that they had been led to expect from the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. By the end of World War II, Britain, backed by the United States, which was even less tolerant of French imperial claims, helped the Lebanese and the Syrians to exclude France altogether from the Levant.

Waning French Influence in the Twentieth Century

In the aftermath of the war, the French were peripherally involved in the question of Palestine and the Zionists as this problem developed into the Arab–Israel conflict that more directly affected Britain and the United States. Frequently criticized for their failings in the Middle East, the French rarely denied themselves the opportunity to embarrass their "allies" by taking the high ground in their assessments of the problem. French involvement with Zionism, however, reflected their ambiguous relationship to the Jew as "other." This relationship had traversed the spectrum from the offer of assimilation and French citizenship at the time of the French Revolution, to threats of rejection in the turn-of-the-century Dreyfus Affair, to denial of protection against Nazi Germany by Vichy France during World War II. French opportunism, however,
was such that France secretly armed and courted Israel for assistance when, for the last time, it joined Britain as a principal actor in the Middle East in the ill-conceived Suez expedition of 1956, a century after the two had concluded the Crimean War as equal partners. Together they made a futile attempt not only to turn the clock back and humiliate Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the symbol of changes in an Arab world they could no longer control, but also to belie the lesser roles assigned them in the new global superpower rivalries of the cold war.

The French had embraced the Suez adventure primarily in the hope of stemming the tide of Arab independence, which had surfaced with revolutionary ardor in 1954 in Algeria, their only remaining North African possession. Their occupation of that region of the Maghrib had begun in 1830 when an opportunist French government swept away the autonomous Ottoman administration of the city of Algiers, whose tradition of privateering had alienated what was then international opinion, and with whom commercial cupidity had brought the French in dispute. Sometime after they completed the conquest of Algeria, a combination of imperialist pressures and the nineteenth-century scramble for African territories encouraged the French to flank it with a protectorate over Tunisia in 1881 and another over Morocco in 1912.

Collapse of French Imperialism and Its Aftermath

France's more pervasive domination of North Africa, and the colonization that accompanied it, particularly in Algeria, meant that the French encounter with the peoples of the Middle East was more deeply experienced in the Maghrib than in the Levant. The conquest of the Algerian interior spanned four decades of intermittent campaigning against the resistance of its Muslim Arab and Berber inhabitants. They underwent a more painful and less rewarding experience than that of the Egyptians earlier in the century. The extensive destabilization of their traditional societies eased the way for colonists who were as repressive of the rights of the indigenous majority as they were determined to safeguard their own exclusive rights as French citizens by attaching the most productive region of Algeria to metropolitan France. Always active in French politics, the colons resisted a number of imaginative projects that might have helped them build up a working relationship with their Arab and Berber neighbors. Not surprisingly, after Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic wound up the Algerian War in 1962, the whole colon community beat a headlong retreat to France.

The idea of carrying on a bilingual cultural dialogue to find ways of accommodating Islamic and French sociopolitical conduct was more welcome to Tunisian and Moroccan reformers, both before and after the French occupation. They were attracted to accommodation as a way of both assimilating modernizing changes on their own terms and equipping themselves to deal with the French in their midst. The antithetical features of French influence were such, though, that the latter, belittling the validity of compromises with the "other," were generally reluctant to make the necessary concessions in terms of either association or assimilation. The differences between what the French imperialists practiced and what France's social conscience preached did little to smooth the way for modernizing changes in the Maghrib and France; rather, they overburdened the process. In order to move forward and to overcome the impeding French presence, the North Africans pursued costly struggles for independence, while France only recognized their independence in the 1950s and early 1960s after suffering the consequences of its own failures, first in the Indo–Chinese War and then in the Algerian War.

French influence and the problems of working out an accommodation with the "other" did not disappear with the demise of the French empire in the Middle East and North Africa. France and the peoples of these regions continue as long-standing neighbors in the coalescing global village of the twenty-first century, where the management of changes has become an even greater challenge, and where socioeconomic and political developments have a more immediate ripple effect. France's cultural and socioeconomic experiences have been directed toward European union, while those of the Middle East and North Africa have been directed toward revolution, dictatorship, reexamination of fundamental beliefs, and, in the case of Lebanon, which has been overcome by the magnitude of the problems facing it, civil war. In a world of permeable frontiers, differences in the felicity of these two experiences have resulted in the reverse flow of a substantial number of Middle Eastern and North African immigrants to France. Their communal presence there—the result of France's encounter with the people of those regions—has brought home to French society, as never before, the problem of accommodating the "other," a challenge that has been carried over to twenty-first-century France, as much as the problem of reconciling French-inspired changes to their own traditions has been carried over to the twenty-first-century Middle East and North Africa.

See also Algerian War of Independence; Bonaparte, Napoléon; Capitulations; Colons; Crimean War; De Gaulle, Charles; Dreyfus Affair; Eastern Question; Maghrib; Maronites; Muhammad Ali; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Selim III; Sublime Porte; Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916).

Bibliography

Horne, Alistair. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, revised edition. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Khoury, Philip S. Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Landes, David. Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt. London: Heinemann, 1958.

Moreh, Shmuel, tr. Napoléon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti's Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation, 1798. Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener, 1993.

Ruedy, John. Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Spagnolo, John P. France and Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1914. London: Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre, St. Antony's College Oxford, 1977.

John P. Spagnolo